On the law issued in France to increase the population
Montesquieu on Louis XIV's pensions for large families and on how a depopulated state can be revived, from "The Spirit of the Laws".
demography
World population growth to 2100
For a long time the world's population grew very slowly, passing 1 billion only in 1804; two centuries later it reached 8 billion. UN forecasts now expect growth to level off after the 2050s.
Record-low birth rates in the West and Japan
Birth rates have fallen to record lows across the West and Japan. In 2023 the EU recorded 3.665 million births, the fewest since records began in 1961, and the figure was down 5.5% on the year before.
How Latvia's population grew under the USSR and shrank after EU accession
The chart shows how Latvia's population grew while it was part of the USSR, and how it declined after leaving the Union and joining the EU.
The world's largest economies by 2050: Saudi Arabia
Ibn Khaldun's theory of asabiya explains the rise and fall of elites, and it still reads true today. The piece then turns to Saudi Arabia's demography and the mounting pressure of Yemen's population growth.
The world's largest economies by 2050, continued: Egypt
Egypt's population passed 110.5 million at the end of 2023, growing by more than 2% a year, with fertility of 3.53 births per woman.